Device Labeling (Node Feature Discovery)

Status: Supported

tt-operator deploys Node Feature Discovery (NFD) to detect Tenstorrent hardware and label the nodes that have it. Those labels are what make the Driver Manager, telemetry, and your own workloads schedule only where a device is present.

What it does

NFD inspects each node’s PCI devices and applies the label:

feature.node.kubernetes.io/pci-1200_1e52.present=true

to every node that has a Tenstorrent device (PCI vendor 1e52). The chart restricts NFD to the PCI source only, so it does not add the full set of CPU, kernel, and system labels. This keeps node labels focused and the footprint small.

Verify

kubectl get nodes -l feature.node.kubernetes.io/pci-1200_1e52.present=true

Every node with a Tenstorrent device should be listed. If a node you expect is missing, confirm the device is visible on the host with lspci and that the NFD worker pod is running on that node.

Configuration

NFD is enabled by default. To turn it off, for example if you already run NFD cluster-wide, set:

--set node-feature-discovery.enabled=false

The feature and label sources are restricted to pci via node-feature-discovery.worker.config.core.featureSources and labelSources. See the Configuration reference for the full set of NFD values.